The Unrepentant

I am delighted that at the prospect of The Unrepentant’s appearing in English, especially since it provides me with an opportunity to acquaint American readers with my country and its people, and, more particularly, with events leading up to the events I recount in this book.  I have read and continue to read much about Americans and the USA, but I have not visited America, and I will never be able to do so not so much because I am now advanced in years—hope does not die in an individual—as because my political views and activities prevent me from being allowed to do so. 

I was born June 8, 1910, in a village called Aghioi Theodoroi, the fourth of eight children, of whom the second died as an infant.  In ancient times there was a Greek settlement here called Krommuon because it had a reputation for its production of onions (kremmudy).  As a small child I heard much talk about America, a distant, vast and rich country.  Once I received a fine present from an uncle who settled in the States, seeking to improve his lot, but returned to marry off his five daughters with dowries.  Other country people emigrated in the first and second decades of the twentieth century, seeking work and to advance their fortunes.  A few remained in the States.

Reports about America as a country of wealth and industry, of freedom and democracy persisted.  The impoverished villagers maintained a naïve admiration for the American people.   When I grew up and entered the Greek revolutionary moment and read Marx and Lenin’s writings about the American working class and studied its democratic struggles and became acquainted with masterpieces of American literature, my admiration strengthened into love and respect.  Still later as I became more aware of the suffering of the Greeks under despotic regimes and of America’s intervention in our domestic affairs, my sentiments changed to hostility for official America, for the government of the USA.  I have written in my books and articles that the anti-American feeling of the Greek people is not directed against the American people, against American workers and the American progressive movement, which can boast of a great and worthy history. 

My parents worked hard at various jobs to provide bread for the many mouths in their family and employed their older children in their store, in their cheese, retsina and firewood businesses as well as in their restaurant.  An orphan, my father had to work from his earliest years and never attended school.  Intelligent, clear-eyed and with broad experience, he sought to see his dreams realized in me, that I would pursue my studies and become a lawyer and, why not? a deputy, a cabinet minister!  I completed elementary school in the village and continued on to secondary school in Corinth.  The final year the students ended the term three months early because in April 1928 a terrible earthquake struck the Corinth area.  In this event we gained new warm feelings for Americans because the Metropolitan of Corinth, who later became the head of the Greek church as well as regent and prime minister (1945-1946), went to the United States and  made a collection among Greek-Americans for Corinth relief.

Greeks suffered nearly four hundred years under Turkish slavery, from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until 1821, the year of the great national uprising.  During those centuries there were numerous liberation struggles, some supported by Russia; all were crushed with much bloodshed.  Not simply out of patriotism but with objective judgment I view with awe the courageous struggles of the modern Greeks, a small people that rose up against repression, starving, without an army, without arms and battled for seven years against a seemingly omnipotent empire in an unequal and heroic rebellion with tremendous casualties.  At a point of collapse, the uprising was saved, as Marx noted, by the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-1829.   The subsequent treaty of London drafted by the “Protecting Great Powers” (Britain, France and Russia) provided for a tiny, inviable, mutilated country of some 800 thousand souls with a capital first at Naflion and the isle of Aegina and later in 1833 at Athens, a village at the time.  The country was confined within narrow boundaries on the mainland along with a few islands but without Thessaly, Macedonia, Thrace, the greater part of Epirus and all the major islands, including Crete, the Dodecanese and the Aegean and Ionian islands.  Another ninety years would pass before these areas would pass under Greek control. 

But the weakness of the modern Greek government did not lie merely in the fact that the greater part of the nation continued to suffer under the Turkish yoke but also tha